CROSS CURRENTS IN SOUTHERN INDIA
The elections in the Southern Provinces presented a somewhat different
picture though the defeat of "Non-co-operation" was equally complete.
The Nerbudda river has been from times immemorial a great dividing line,
climatic, racial, and often political, between Northern and Southern
India. It still is so. For, whilst with a few relatively unimportant
exceptions the whole of British India--save Burma, which, except from an
administrative point of view, is not India at all--has been brought with
perhaps excessive uniformity within the scope of the new constitutional
reforms, many conditions in the Central Provinces and in the great
Presidency of Madras differ widely from those prevailing in the other
major provinces north of the Nerbudda, and the actual failure of
"Non-co-operation" to enforce its boycott of the elections was less
noteworthy than some other features in the new situation. In the Central
Provinces the elections themselves were fought out on much the same
lines as in the north and with very similar results, if allowance is
made for the intellectual backwardness of the province. Political
activity and agitation had been confined in the past mainly to Nagpur,
the capital, and to the western districts, in which a large Mahratta
element predominates especially amongst the better-educated classes.
Most of Mr. Tilak's former followers there had joined the
"Non-co-operation" movement, and their rigid abstention from the
elections left the doors of the Provincial Council wide open for the
representation of more sober Indian opinion. The Extremists showed their
contempt for the new assembly by putting up one or two "freak"
candidates in breach of the boycott they were preaching, and actually
got in a _dhobi_, or laundryman, at Jubbulpur. But the elections were
overshadowed by the preparations for the Nagpur Congress, which was to
be the great Gandhi counterblast to the Reforms, and the Extremists, who
poured into the province from the neighbouring Bombay Presidency,
concentrated their efforts on the creation of an atmosphere of general
unrest favourable to the new line of campaign upon which the rump of the
old Indian National Congress was about to enter with the open
renunciation of the fundamental article of its original creed--loyalty
to the British connection.
It seems one of the strangest of the many anomalies with which the
Indian situation teems that the Central Provinces should have been
chosen of all others as the scene for a great spectacular demonstration
of revolt against the state of "slavery" to which Indians have been
reduced by a "Satanic" alien rule. It is one of the precepts of Mr.
Gandhi's gospel of "Non-co-operation," though doubtless only as a
counsel of perfection, that Indian husbands and wives must cease to
bring "slave" children into the world until India has attained _Swaraj_.
Yet in the Central Provinces a larger proportion of Indian children than
in any other province are born every year to a state of degradation much
more closely akin to slavery, which is not imposed upon them by any
alien rulers, but by the ancient traditions of those of their own race
and creed whose interest it is to perpetuate at the expense of their
less fortunate fellow-countrymen the most cruel form of caste tyranny.
Of the total population of the Central Provinces, which numbered some
sixteen millions at the last Census in 1911, one-fifth belong to that
order of humanity which stands so low in the eyes of Hindus that it is
unworthy to be reckoned as possessing any caste at all. These no-castes
stand at the very foot of the social ladder of Hinduism, and in theory
at least they can never hope to climb even on to its lowest rungs,
though in practice the most stringent laws can be gradually circumvented
with the help of needy Brahmans or will yield to the pressure of
changing economic conditions. They are "untouchable," _i.e._ that any
physical contact with them involves defilement of which the caste Hindu
can only cleanse himself by ritual ablutions and other forms of
ceremonial purification. Go into a village which is partially inhabited
by these unfortunate people, mostly called Mahars in that part of India,
and you will find that they are forbidden even to draw water from any
but their own wells, as by drawing it from wells used by caste Hindus
they would render them impure. In the larger urban schools under
Government control British laws, which recognise no caste distinctions,
enforce the admission of Mahar boys, some of whom do extremely well. But
in a village school you will often see the poor little "untouchables,"
if admitted at all, relegated to mats on the outside verandah, where
they may pick up such scraps of teaching as they can. The Government
inspector of schools may remonstrate, but he knows that few teachers
will make any serious attempt to mend matters, and that if they did the
caste-boys would be withdrawn by their indignant parents.
When I was touring a few years ago in the Central Provinces with a
British commissioner, who was carrying on an inquiry into certain
grievances of the peasantry in connection with irrigation, the villagers
from the more remote villages were frequently collected along the road
to tell their story, and they brought with them their land-records.
These the "untouchables" had to lay on the ground at the feet of the
Brahman subordinate, who would have been defiled had he taken them
straight out of their hands, and only after they had withdrawn a few
paces did he condescend to pick up the books and verify them before
passing them on to his British superior. The latter, on the other hand,
though the representative, according to Congress orators, of a "Satanic"
Government that has reduced Indians to "slavery," never hesitated to
question the poor "untouchables" closely and good-humouredly, not merely
about the particular matter at issue, but about the condition of their
crops or the health of their village, and sometimes gave a friendly pat
on the back to the youngsters who accompanied their elders, whilst the
Brahman stood by in stony and disgusted silence.
These caste discriminations doubtless originated in remote ages when the
Aryan conquerors from the north gradually subdued the aboriginal
Dravidian populations. The "untouchables" are mostly remnants of that
population, some of them still very primitive jungle folk whom the
Census classes as "animists," or nature-worshippers, _i.e._ they still
worship trees and stones and the spirits that are supposed to dwell in
them. But they tend gradually to include in their worship some of the
gods and goddesses of the Hindu Pantheon, especially those who are
credited with power to avert the worst scourges to which the people
happen to be subject. Under a sacred roadside tree I have seen in one
place a rude stone, roughly shaped to represent the Goddess of
Small-pox, and alongside of it a clay image of a tiger that had killed a
man on that very spot, set up in the hope of averting further
manifestations of its wrath, and also of appeasing the dead man's soul
so that he might remain quietly within the tiger and become a kindly
protector to the village. The appropriation of Hindu deities is usually
the first step towards their absorption into the Hindu social structure.
Others, the more progressive, have settled down as cultivators, a few
occasionally becoming quite considerable land-owners. Others, again,
have taken to weaving and to petty trade. Under British rule they have
progressed all along the line. A Mahar regiment has been raised,
officered by Mahomedans from the north, as no Hindu would think of
serving with "untouchables," and though Hindu sepoys must not be
brought into proximity with it, it has always behaved very creditably.
Some Mahars are now well educated, and in favour of two of them the
Governor of the Central Provinces has exercised the right conferred upon
him to nominate a certain number of members to the Provincial
Legislative Council in order to give some representation to communities
too backward to secure any for themselves under the existing franchise.
One of the best results of British governance and of Western education
has been to stimulate even amongst the "untouchables" a new sense of
self-respect and self-reliance and a wholesome desire to emerge from the
degradation to which the custom of centuries has condemned them. It is
amongst them that of late years Christian and even Mahomedan
missionaries have found all over India their most fruitful field, and in
some provinces mass-movements to Christianity have taken place, which
are admittedly due in the first place to a desire for social
emancipation, but will steadily lead, if properly handled, to moral and
religious advancement. One of the great problems now before the
missionary societies of all Christian denominations is how these tens of
thousands of converts can be taught and trained, and it is of great
promise for the future that a Commission of Inquiry composed of British
and American and Indian Christian missionaries has recently issued a
report on Village Education in India which has approached this problem,
amongst others, with a broad-minded appreciation of its economic and
social as well as purely religious aspects.
Is it surprising that when the Indian National Congress, that has
hitherto done nothing for them beyond embodying in its programme vague
expressions of sympathy, is agitating for the severance of the British
connection, and Extremist orators perambulate the country to preach a
boycott of British officials, the Mahars should have sent in petitions
imploring the Governor not to abandon them or surrender the power which
has alone done something to raise them out of the slough of despond? Mr.
Gandhi, however, who would be a great social reformer had he not
preferred to plunge into a dangerous political agitation, is not himself
blind to such an awful blot as "untouchability" has made on Hindu
civilisation, and some of his followers, prompted perhaps less than he
is himself by a generous reforming spirit, have not been slow to see
what abundant materials lie ready to their hand in these vast masses,
profoundly ignorant and superstitious, if they can only be drawn into
the turbid stream of "Non-co-operation" by some novel and ingenious
appeal to their fears or to their appetites.
In the Madras Presidency, never swept to the same degree as Bengal or
Bombay by the waves of political unrest, the electoral struggle assumed
a form, peculiar to Southern Indian conditions, in which
"Non-co-operation" entered very little. For Southern India has its own
life-history which differentiates it in many respects from other parts
of India, and in none more so than in the survival of the Brahman's
ancient ascendancy, until recently almost unchallenged in this
stronghold of Hinduism.
Mostly of the primitive Dravidian stock that inhabited the peninsula
before the great Aryan inflow from the north, and still speaking
Dravidian languages, the people of Southern India have preserved in its
most archaic form the social system of Hinduism which the Aryan
conquerors, probably never more than a small minority, imposed upon them
by the relative superiority of their civilisation quite as much as by
force of arms. Of a much fairer complexion, the Aryans became the ruling
"white" race of those days, and to preserve their racial prestige they
enforced the most rigid laws for the differentiation of caste--which
originally meant colour. The Brahmans, being the law-givers, naturally
framed laws to secure the pre-eminence of their own caste, and to the
present day, for instance, in the more remote parts of Southern India,
men of the lower castes may be seen retiring hastily from the road at
his approach, lest they should pollute the air he breathes by coming
within a forbidden distance of him.
In Southern India, where Buddhist influence never secured any firm
footing, Hinduism had its golden age during the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, whilst the tide of Mahomedan invasion was pouring in
successive waves into Northern and Central India. The last and greatest
of the Hindu kingdoms of Southern India did not succumb to the sword of
Islam till 1565, and the splendid ruins of Vijianagar bear out, if we
make allowance for oriental hyperbole, the contemporary testimony of a
Persian Ambassador that "the pupil of the eye has never seen a place
like it and the ear of intelligence has never been informed that there
existed anything to equal it in the whole world." The Moslem conquerors
laid Vijianagar low. But, by the curious irony of fortune, it was from a
descendant of its royal house, some remnants of which escaped
destruction, that the British, by whom Mahomedan domination was to be in
turn overthrown, received their first grant of land on the Carnatic
coast close to where Madras now stands.
Mahomedan domination came so late to Southern India and lasted for such
a brief period that it never disturbed, even to the small extent that it
did in Northern India, the social stratifications of Hinduism, which
have equally withstood there more than anywhere else the subtler
pressure of Western civilisation under British rule. Take, for instance,
a small town like Tirupati, only a few miles from Chatnagiri, where the
Rajahs, whose forebears made that momentous grant to Francis Day a
little less than three centuries ago, still live in modest state. Were
Tirupati still ruled by the Vijianagar kings in all their splendour, it
could hardly present a better-preserved picture of ancient Hindu life.
At the foot of a steep range of hills crowned with venerable temples
whose sanctity has from times immemorial attracted a constant stream of
pilgrims, and possessing some famous temples of its own, it is
essentially a Brahman town, and lives almost entirely by ministering, at
more or less extortionate rates, to the material and spiritual needs of
pilgrims, averaging about a thousand a day in ordinary times and scores
of thousands at the special festival seasons, on their way to and from
the sacred hill-top. There are whole streets of lodgings for their use,
consisting chiefly of small bare cubicles, and rows of shops at which
they can purchase their simple vegetarian food and innumerable religious
trifles as mementoes of their pilgrimage. When I approached Tirupati,
early in the morning, a few groups of pilgrims were already on their way
to the hill-sanctuaries and peasants were starting work on the temple
lands outside the town. Sacred monkeys gambolled about the trees and
still more sacred cows had begun to exercise their daily privilege of
browsing for food wherever their fancy leads them, even amongst the
vegetables exposed for sale in the public market-places. The Brahmans
themselves were still engaged in performing their elaborate morning
devotions and ablutions, but the members of their household had already
swept the approach to their low, one-storied, flat-roofed houses and
stencilled on the threshold with white liquid chalk the geomantic
patterns, finished off with scattered marigolds, which keep away the
evil spirits. The Brahman quarters surround the temples, of which of
course only the outer courtyards are accessible to other than high-caste
Hindus. The low-caste "untouchables," who do the menial work of the
town, live strictly segregated in their own quarter, which consists only
of mud huts and even flimsier shelters of platted palm-leaves and
bamboos. The whole town wore an air of leisured superiority as if
conscious that there can be no need for special effort when the gods
bring pilgrims to provide for the wants of its "twice-born" inhabitants.
There are scores of other Tirupatis in which the Brahman still reigns
supreme by virtue of his _quasi_-sacerdotal caste. But in the public
life of Southern India, as British rule has moulded it, he has owed a
pre-eminence only recently disputed to a monopoly of Western education
in modern times almost as complete as the monopoly which he enjoyed of
Hindu learning and culture before the advent of the British. As soon as
he saw that the British _Raj_ threatened no curtailment of his
hereditary supremacy in the religious and social world of Hinduism, he
was quick to profit by all the material advantages which the country as
a whole derived from a new era of public security and peace. He realised
at once that Western education might open up for him opportunities of
making himself almost as indispensable, if on a somewhat humbler scale,
to the alien rulers of India as he had formerly made himself to the
indigenous rulers in the land. Thus the Brahmans acquired from the first
a virtual monopoly of all the subordinate public services in the Madras
Presidency and, as time went on, of all the higher posts gradually
thrown open to Indians. They crowded also into all the new liberal
professions fostered by Western education, and, above all, into the
legal profession for which they showed, as most Indians do, a very
special aptitude. But, like all monopolists, they were tempted to abuse
their monopoly, the more so as they regarded it merely as a legitimate
adaptation to the new conditions imported by British rule of the ancient
privileges always vested in their caste. They resented any attempt on
the part of Hindus belonging to inferior castes to follow in their
footsteps along the new paths of Western learning and to qualify for a
share of employment in the public services, for which under the British
dispensation all Indians are entitled to compete on equal terms
irrespective of all caste discriminations. The non-Brahmans were slow to
start, and when they did start, they had to contend with the jealous
opposition of the Brahmans, who combined, as Hindu castes know how to
combine, against unwelcome intruders into a profitable field of which
they had secured early possession. When the Public Services Commission
was in Madras eight years ago, we heard many bitter complaints from
non-Brahmans that, whenever one of them did succeed in getting an
appointment under Government, the Brahmans with whom or under whom he
had to work would at once unite to drive him out, either by making his
life intolerable or by turning against him the European superior to
whose ear they had easy access. For it is one of the weaknesses of an
alien bureaucracy that, in regard to routine work at least, its weaker
members are apt to be far too much in the hands of their native
assistants. The Brahmans later on formed the bulk of the new
Western-educated and "politically-minded" class, and the Madrasee
Brahmans played a considerable part in the Indian National Congress
before it broke away from its constitutional moorings.
The non-Brahmans, nevertheless, under the leadership of such resolute
men as the late Dr. Nair, fought their way steadily to the front, and,
being of course in a large majority, they had only to organise in order
to make full use of the opportunity which a relatively democratic
franchise afforded them for the first time at the recent elections. They
can hardly themselves have foreseen how great their opportunity was, for
they regarded the reforms at first with deep suspicion as calculated
merely to transfer substantive power from a British to a Brahman
bureaucracy, and so deep was their dread of Brahman ascendancy even in
the new Councils that they clamoured to the very end for a much larger
number of seats than the sixteen that were ultimately reserved as
"communal" seats for non-Brahman electorates. They never needed such a
reservation, for they actually carried the day in so many of the
"general" constituencies that out of ninety-eight elected members of the
new Provincial Council only fourteen are Brahmans, and it is the
Brahmans now who complain, not without reason, that their representation
falls short of their legitimate influence in the State, and are already
demanding a reservation of "communal" seats for their own caste in
future. Lord Willingdon, as a constitutional Governor, chose from the
non-Brahman majority in the Council all the three Indian Ministers who
form part of the new Provincial Government and preside over the
"transferred" departments. This is the most startling transformation
scene which any of the Provincial elections has produced. The
non-Brahmans have got the chance which they have long claimed. If they
rise to the occasion, deal with the Brahmans more fairly than the latter
dealt with them, and, remembering the struggle they have had for their
own emancipation, help the "untouchables" to rise in their turn out of
the state of degradation to which centuries of Brahman domination have
condemned them, the reforms may prove to have been perhaps as important
a landmark in the moral regeneration of Hindu society as in the
development of the Indian body politic. For, though it would be unfair
to forget that the rigidity of the great caste system probably alone
saved Hindu society from complete disintegration during centuries of
internal anarchy and foreign invasions, its survival would be fatal now
to the advancement of India on new lines of democratic progress. In any
case the triumph of the non-Brahmans is an unmistakable blow to
"Non-co-operation." Their one grievance against British rule has
hitherto been that it tolerated Brahman ascendancy and refused to
co-operate with them in their passionate struggle against it. But now
there is nothing to damp their zeal or deter them from co-operating with
Government in securing the permanent success of the reforms to which, as
they have to admit in spite of their former suspicions, they owe a
measure of political advancement that far exceeds all their
anticipations.
In Southern as well as in Northern India the failure of the
Non-co-operationists' frontal attack on the reforms was beyond dispute.
They were resolved to kill them in the womb by laying an interdict upon
the elections to the new popular assemblies. No candidate, Mr. Gandhi
had pronounced, was to enter for election, no elector was to record his
vote. At a moment when the elections were already in progress and should
have at least tempered his optimism, he himself assured me that the
results as a whole would yet afford a most splendid demonstration of the
stern temper of the people that would never trust and would never accept
the mockery of reforms proceeding from a "Satanic" Government. He was
deaf to my suggestion that, even if the temper of the Indian people was
such as he believed it to be, it would have been demonstrated in a
manner far more intelligible to the political mind of the West had his
followers taken part in the elections, and, after sweeping the board in
accordance with his anticipations, had then placed their demands,
whatever they might be, on record before the world, declaring at the
same time that, unless they were fully granted, they would walk out of
every Council Chamber in India and bring down the whole edifice of
reforms, which would then indeed have been hopelessly shattered. Things,
on the contrary, went quite differently. In defiance of Mr. Gandhi,
candidates came forward in almost every constituency, elections were
held everywhere, and except for a few insignificant disturbances created
by his followers they were held in peaceful and orderly fashion. There
were indeed numerous and in some places very large abstentions. That
many of those who kept away from the polls were convinced
"Non-co-operationists" cannot be denied, but no more can it be denied
that many kept away from fear, not altogether unjustified by the event,
of actual violence or of the more insidious forms of intimidation which
social and religious pressure assumes with particularly deadly effect in
India. Reputable members, including a large proportion of the leaders
who had fought for years past the battle of India's political
advancement, took their seats in the Provincial Councils and in the
All-India Legislature at Delhi. They represented, not unfairly on the
whole, all classes and creeds and communities, and even all schools of
political thought, except, of course, the Extremists, who by their own
default remained unrepresented. That the Extremists, whose influence
cannot be ignored, should have remained unrepresented is not a matter
entirely for congratulation, for the complete exclusion, even when
self-inflicted, of any important political party must tend to weaken the
authority of a popular Assembly. At the same time, it may be doubted
whether the abstention of "Non-co-operationists" has deprived the Indian
Councils of more than a very few individuals whose ability and
character, apart from their political opinions, would have given them
any great weight. The splendid demonstration which Mr. Gandhi had
contemplated fell completely flat because an overwhelming proportion of
those to whom he directed his appeal refused to endorse his view that
the great constitutional changes of which the creation of popular
Assemblies was the corner-stone were merely a snare and a delusion, and
to his cry of "Non-co-operation" they opposed an emphatic affirmation of
their belief that the salvation of India lay in co-operation.